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That’s huge. I’m one of those 61 percent. Sure, I buy all my books
online, but I find new books and authors by browsing my local Barnes
& Noble. And what happens if that local Barnes & Noble goes
away? It’s not looking good for them as a business right now. Well, I’m
confident readers will figure out a way to find books, but there will be
a gap until then.
Another good quote comes from Peter Hildick-Smith, CEO of Codex Group:

“Physical retail works if you protect it …
Movie producers do [protect movie theaters]. I would argue publishers
are not doing enough to help bookstores.”

I completely agree. B&N and the publishers have a vested interest
in keeping the company alive and healthy. Earlier this month, I wrote
about this on our sister site, GadgeTell.
So …. why doing as much as they could? (Or, as Hildick-Smith suggested, as much as they should?)

“I’m descended from a long line of book worms and librarians. They would be very proud of me for being here with you.” Caroline Kennedy’s revelation at the beginning of her Auditorium Speaker Series talk at ALA Midwinter set the tone for the entire session. Her talk and Q&A with ALA President-elect Barbara Stripling was filled with stories that detailed how learning, books, and poetry shaped her famous family, interwoven with reminders of the important roles that libraries and librarians play as guardians and facilitators of information and ideas, role models to youth, and voices for communities. Read more...

Published: January 29, 2013

None of New York’s great buildings embody the spirit of the city more than the New York Public Library, the cherished century-old Beaux-Arts landmark in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. But cities change — New York all the time — and even the greatest buildings may need to change with them. So it was that more than four years ago the library announced a $250 million plan (since revised upward to $300 million and still rising). Norman Foster, the celebrity architect, was enlisted to revamp and modernize the 42nd Street building. Read more...

Published: January 27, 2013

Danielle Cosgrove, left, referred Riju Parakh for a job at Ernst & Young. Ms. Parakh was hired within three weeks.

Riju Parakh wasn’t even looking for a new job.

But when a friend at Ernst & Young recommended her, Ms. Parakh’s résumé was quickly separated from the thousands the firm receives every week because she was referred by a current employee, and within three weeks she was hired. “You know how long this usually takes,” she said. “It was miraculous.” Read more...

“While there has overall been an enormous surge in the number of students who are pursuing degree programs and coursework online, in recent years there has been an increased focus, perhaps spurred on by the economic crisis, on providing high quality online courses free of charge. While these courses often can’t be used toward a degree, they do provide students all over the world with the opportunity to learn, grow, and potentially even prepare themselves for the working world. Surprisingly, some of the schools getting in on the popularity of free online courses (and in some cases even pioneering the practice) are among the best schools in the U.S., if not the world. Here are just a handful of the great schools that are now offering, and encouraging others to offer, free online courses that anyone can use.

Harvard launched a much publicized collaborative program with MIT in 2012 called edX, offering online university-level courses in a wide range of fields for no charge. The non-profit project has attracted a lot of attention and in its first semester more than 100,000 students signed up for free online versions of its computer science and public health courses. Harvard Law has also gotten in on the free online course game, and just this year announced that it will be offering a free course on copyright law to 500 lucky students, complete with certificates of completion. Read more...

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

NEWS ANALYSIS: In yet another unintended consequence of some very flawed legislation, it’s now illegal to unlock any phone you purchase after Jan. 26.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has been the source of both controversy and consternation since it became law 15 years ago. Because of the DMCA, it became illegal to defeat the encryption on a DVD you purchased so you could watch a movie on your Linux computer.

It became illegal to make a binary copy of a movie so you could watch it on your iPad. Now, because the Librarian of Congress has decided it to be this way, it’s now illegal to unlock phones purchased on or after Jan. 26.

No doubt you’re asking yourself several questions. First, how is it that the DMCA has anything to do with phones? Second, why does the Librarian of Congress have anything to do with whether phone unlocking is illegal? We could go on from there. Read more...

Summary:
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theoristClay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced.

If you’ve been following our coverage of the disruption of the publishing industry, you know that the meaning of the term “book” has become pretty fluid, thanks to the e-book revolution; and it’s not just the Kindle, but new offerings like Byliner and Atavist, which blur the lines between books and magazines, and even new variations on an old format like serialized fiction. So do physical books really matter any more? Is there something special about them, or are they just a historical artifact whose time has come and gone? Read more....

Workstation

How to Say ‘Look at Me!’ to an Online Recruiter

By PHYLLIS KORKKI

Published: January 26, 2013

IF you are thinking of looking for a job this year, or are already searching for one, be warned: for some job seekers, the rules have changed. Technology and social media have altered the way some employers consider candidates. Simply sifting through job postings and sending out applications en masse was never a good route to success, and is even less so now. Read more.

For Carr, this is both a social and a biological problem; among the most interesting parts of “The Shallows” are those dealing with the brain. Computers, Carr argues — or, more to the point, our use of them — are literally rewiring our brain chemistry, causing us to think differently than we did in an analog world.

What should students learn in the 21st century? At first glance, this question divides into two: what should students know, and what should they be able to do? But there's more at issue than knowledge and skills. For the innovation economy, dispositions come into play: readiness to collaborate, attention to multiple perspectives, initiative, persistence, and curiosity. While the content of any learning experience is important, the particular content is irrelevant. What really matters is how students react to it, shape it, or apply it. The purpose of learning in this century is not simply to recite inert knowledge, but, rather, to transform it.1 It is time to change the subject.

This is no small matter. For more than a century, the whole point of schooling has been to restrict the curriculum, specify the required content, and limit the entry points to it -- often by means of a watered-down, already obsolete text, mediated by a classroom manager whose task is to transmit the subject matter to 30 or more individuals of diverse backgrounds, experiences, interests, and resources. This is particularly true of the "big four" core subjects that the Carnegie Commission decided, nearly a century ago, to be the subjects that matter. English, math, science (biology, chemistry, and physics), and social studies count for much, and the fine and practical arts for much less. .Read more.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Discovering the Impact of Library Use and Student Performance

Brian Cox is Manager Quality and Marketing, and Margie Jantti is University Librarian at the University of Wollongong Library.

Key Takeaways

Without a valid, reliable way to collect data from various library and enterprise systems, it's difficult to quantitatively assert how a library adds value.

The University of Wollongong Library developed the Library Cube, a tailored database and reporting function that joins library usage data with student data, including demographic and academic performance information.

Analysis of the resulting data reveals a strong correlation between students' grades and use of information resources the library provides.

By
providing access to information resources, academic libraries play a
significant role in the student experience. To date, efforts to assess
the impact of accessing library-owned or subscribed content have largely
focused on satisfaction surveys, feedback, and "return on investment"
projects such as contingent valuation. Although surveys and feedback
systems provide data and information on a range of service elements,
they are limited in their capacity to provide information and insight
into the perceived value gained by engaging with the library — that is,
on a client's return on effort for using library services and resources.
They are also unable to identify non-users effectively. Faculty
awareness and knowledge of student use of library information resources
is equally limited. Read more...

Monday, January 21, 2013

Mural at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, District of Columbia Public Library

January and February have a number of memorial holidays, but special days aren’t the only way communities celebrate their heroes.

Are there statues in your community created to honor those who have made a difference? Have buildings in your town been named or renamed for important people in history? Do you know of streets named for notable people? What can a memorial–a place, a building, a work of art–tell us about the individual, the community, and the memorial’s creators?

In many cities in the United States you will find a street named for Martin Luther King, Jr. Many places have schools or other buildings named for Dr. King. Washington, D.C., is no exception. The nation’s capital is home to the national King Memorial and we have a major street named for King. The District of Columbia central library building also bears his name. Walk inside and you can see a unique tribute to the civil rights leader. Noted artist Don Miller created a mural documenting King’s life, as seen here in a photograph from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress. Read more...

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Measured en masse, the stack of "books I want to read" that sits precariously on the edge of a built-in bookshelf in my dining room just about eclipses 5,000 pages. The shelf is full to bursting with titles I hope to consume at some indeterminate point in the future.

It would be a lot easier to manage if I just downloaded all those books to an iPad or Kindle. None are hard to find editions that would be unavailable in a digital format, and a few are recent hardcover releases, heavy and unwieldy.

But there's something about print that I can't give up. There's something about holding a book in your hand and the visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can't be matched with pixels on a screen.

Yet the writing appears to be on the wall: E-books are slowly subsuming the printed format as the preferred vehicle on which people read books. E-books topped print sales for the first time in 2011, a trend that continued into 2012. Just this month, Bexar County, Texas announced plans for the nation's first electronic-only library. A recent study from Scholastic found that the percentage of children who have read an e-book has nearly doubled since 2010 to almost half of all kids aged 9 to 17, while the number who say they'll continue to read books in print instead of electronically declined from 66% to 58%.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.
Thomas Jefferson – letter to John Wyche, 1809.

From one standpoint, public libraries seem like a small thorn in the side of embattled publishers. They account for a small percentage of book sales, but bleed off more sales by lending bestsellers promiscuously. Publishers, anxious to discover the next Fifty Shades or Hunger Games have little time for their nattering and would prefer that the current fight over eBook pricing quietly disappeared.

But there is another side to public libraries in America: they are dynamic, versatile community centers. They welcomed more than 1.59 billion visitors in 2009 and lent books 2.4 billion times – more than 8 times for each citizen. More than half of young adults and seniors living in poverty in the United States used public libraries to access the Internet. They used this access, among other purposes to “find work, apply to college, secure government benefits, and learn about critical medical treatments” For all this, public libraries cost just $42 per citizen each year to maintain.

The growth of electronic reading holds significant opportunities and threats for both public libraries and publishers. This is no small affair: new research from the Pew Research Center shows that a third of Americans now own eBook readers or tablet devices, and Amazon sells more eBooks than print books.

Aaron Swartz, prodigy co-developer of
RSS code and the website Reddit, faced federal charges for distributing
articles from a subscription-based database. Swartz committed suicide at
the age of 26. Margaret Warner talks to Wired magazine's Kevin Poulsen
about Swartz's advocacy to make data available to the public online.

In the days since the tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. It’s an act of solidarity with Swartz’s crusade to liberate (in most cases publicly funded) knowledge for all to read.

While this has been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about the ethics of freeing and sharing scholarly information. It’s as much — if not more — about the psychology and incentives around scholarly publishing. We need to think these issues through much more deeply to make open access widespread.

When the phrase academia is best known for is “publish or perish,” it should come as no surprise that like most human beings, professors are highly attentive to the incentives for validation and advancement. Unfortunately, those incentives often involve publishing in gated journals, which trade scarcity for the subscriptions that sustain them (and provide outsized profits for some commercial publishers). For this reason, open access has not been a high priority for many academics. Read more....

(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)

Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist: